Chronicle of Recent Events
DOI: 10.1134/S0006297911010019
Our journal Biokhimiya is now 75 years of age. The journal’s curriculum vitae, difficulties, and transition through perestroikaand crisis years and also results of our efforts and joys of our uneasy victories are given in detail in anniversary articles written for the 50th (1986, 51, No. 1), 60th (1996, 61, No. 11), and 70th anniversaries of the journal (2006, 71, No. 1), thus now we shall speak about the main events of the last five years.
We also started publication in English of volume No. 13, the translation of the annual publication Uspekhi Biologicheskoi Khimii (Advances in Biochemistry, Editor-in-Chief is L. P. Ovchinnikov) presenting full-length reviews written by invited authors about the most active areas of modern biochemistry.The journal not only increased in volume but also improved in quality as indicated by an increase in the main contemporary index of journal quality – the “impact factor”, the number of cited publications for the two preceding years per published article (see figure).
Impact factor of Biochemistry (Moscow) from 1993 to 2009. The asterisk shows the impact factor for 2009 of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters, the Russian Academy of Science journal having the highest impact factor
In 1996 we established a WWW site (http://protein.bio.msu.su/biokhimiya/) to make available the best papers of each issue free of charge. From 2003 this site has featured “Papers in Press”, presenting the best manuscripts much earlier than in the printed form, and full provision of articles in special issues concerning the brightest problems of modern biochemistry. All this has resulted in a steady and rather rapid growth of our impact factor, which exceeded unity in 2000 and reached the mark of 1.5 in 2007. The figure shows natural fluctuations associated with variable success in the Editors’ choice of materials to be published, but the tendency is obvious, and the average value of the impact factor for the five last years is 1.283.
The high impact factor of Biochemistry (Moscow) puts it in a leading position among more than 130 journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences publishing experimental articles, only slightly behind the internationally recognized Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters, which has an impact factor of 1.662. Skeptics who considered our efforts to make Biochemistry (Moscow) a respected source of the most advanced scientific information to be vain attempts are decreasing in number. The inbox of the journal is constantly full with many submissions from China, India, Turkey, states of the Former Soviet Union, etc., as well as from many Western countries, and so in 2009 the acceptance rate was only 42%, thus insuring only high quality materials corresponding to the interests and profile of the journal are accepted for publication.
We are very grateful to Ivan Alekseevich Adzhubei, the founder and Editor of the Internet version of Biochemistry (Moscow) who has introduced our journal to PubMed, and to the Editors of the English Edition Richard Lozier and his wife Irina Anatolevna Svinukhova, who together with a talented team of translators are responsible for the high level of translation and production of the English version of the journal. We are also grateful to our Russian Editorial Office guided by Nadezhda Ivanovna Chirkova for coordinating the production of the Russian version of the journal, and to our highly qualified typesetters Vladimir Andreevich Pchelin (Russian edition) and Konstantin Sergeevich Chamorovsky (English edition), and certainly to our authors, reviewers, and editors who are responsible for the quality of the journal.
All members of our team work in unison, and the results of our efforts are promising for the continued blooming of Biokhimiya/Biochemistry (Moscow).
V. P. Skulachev
R. D. Ozrina
